Cut-Throat's Pre-emptive Round Up of 2015

Work, independent research and life has made writing here tricky and, I fear with the new year nearing, my posting will only get more sporadic. January-February time is doctoral funding season and work has already begun with my supervisor on my own applications; accordingly I figured that it was worthwhile doing a pre-emptive round up in case I don't have time for it come hectic December. Perhaps I could have pushed this back another month or so but then again this may make for a good ear-marking of the 2000 view milestone that I just hit: I have no idea whether 2000 views in the first 8 months is good or bad in terms of blogs but it feels sufficiently significant.

Procedurally, the process for this post will involve picking one fiction and one non-fiction book alongside one album to stage as particular highlights of the year. None of these works came out in 2015 but they are nonetheless the highlight of my own personal exploration in culture this year. So, moving beyond the fanfare...

Fiction Pick of the Year

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

Welsh, for a long time, has sat on the shelf in my mind labelled "must get round to him someday" and it was a pleasure to finally read him. Trainspotting is a landmark of contemporary Scottish culture which is one of the reasons I wanted to read it: when I lived in Sweden there were a surprising number of people with a strange interest in it; though generally they had seen the film rather than waded through the Scottish accent that characterises the prose. I get the feeling that their fascination was spawned by a morbid curiosity as to how a culture could produce and love a work so notoriously self-loathing.

However, the reputation that Welsh has garnered makes the actual content of the book all the more surprising. In places it is strikingly human and demonstrates a sympathy and keen eye for the foibles, roots and pathologies of its characters. Renton, the narrator focused on in the film but who is one of many in the book, has a clear rebellious streak that occasionally bleeds over into a churlish teenage nihilism but even at his worst has interesting things to say. It's a rather trite cliche but the film really isn't as good as the book; or at least it isn't as in depth. There are startlingly jarring moments such as the feminist-esque parable "The Elusive Mr Hunt" which show a more careful eye for social interaction than that which was allowed onto the silver-screen. I enjoyed it thoroughly and it has thrown my previous perceptions of the author.

Non-Fiction Pick of the Year

The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth

For the past couple of months I have been experimenting more and more with writing guides; this one is far more of a style book than it is a grammar guide. As Forsyth points out, good grammar isn't necessarily always good writing. Academically, Steven Pinker's "The Sense of Style" - itself a brilliant use of descriptive linguistics to create a field manual in good, readable grammar - has probably been more helpful but The Elements of Eloquence is just so much more fun.

The emphasis is very much on having fun with the English language, its rhythms, sounds and various effects. It may not have clued me in on how to perfect my past and present tenses or navigate the various pratfalls of plurals but it certainly re-ignited the fire in my belly for constructing some good memorable prose.  

Album Pick of the Year

Knowledge is Power by Akala

 I have remarked on this blog a number of times about my quest to search out and enjoy new music this year. In light of such talk I think it's only fair to include an album of the year in my round up. One particular genre, which has lead me to reconsider poetry, is hip-hop. I started watching battle rap about a year and a half ago and was blown away at, sexism and homophobia aside, just how witty a lot the rappers were. 

Akala however, I found through the Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle: Boyle invited Akala on to a programme of his in order to talk about racism in the U.K. As you might have guessed Akala is a "conscientious rapper" with a lot his themes and lyrics drawing from the speeches and writings of Malcom X. In particular he has a desire to speak truth to the powerless rather than wasting his breath on the powerful. In this album his focus seems to be on inspiring working class youth, particularly non-white working class youth, to engage in political, social and personal activities that benefit themselves and their communities rather than the owners of capital. Interestingly Akala interprets the role of the modern conscious MC through the tradition of the African Griot, a curator of cultural knowledge, and this no doubt feeds into his role as part of the hip-hop Shakespeare company. I could go on and on, but both the depth of his subject matter and his lyricism when discussing it has made this album a real stand out.

Closing Remarks

As remarked in the title and introduction this is a pre-emptive list. It is only as definitive in so far as I don't update it later in the year, though much of my work will be focused on political philosophy for the next few months and I don't anticipate reading much fiction anytime soon.

Huxley's Brave New World: A Hedonist's Response

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
 
- John the Savage repudiating Mustapha Mond in Brave New World.


There is common comparison made between Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. One that remarks that while Orwell described the authoritarianism of his time, Huxley predicted the "soft-power" at work today. Read in this way the core theme of Brave New World is similar to that of emanicpatory writers like Rousseau: humans are frequently complicit in their own enslavement. This comparison suffers however from a certain level of western-centrism and misses some of the finer details of the dystopia which Huxley created.


Firstly, and a similar point is levelled by Nadya Tolokonnikova against Slavoj Zizek, the notion that modern capitalism controls its subjects through pleasure ignores the sweat-house labour and dictatorial right wing governments that have arguably played a big role in shaping modern global capitalism. Secondly, in Brave New World there is no evidence that humanity willingly gave up its Bibles or poetry; such things are banned and an inescapable system of social conditioning is required to force these artefacts of ancient pleasure into obsolescence. The depravity of the new world's citizens is artificial it is not an organic product of Huxley's subjects and their desires. As a hedonist of sorts,  while I could cry that Huxley's society is the product of authoritarianism and not pleasure seeking humans, that would do Brave New World a dis-service: the book did give me cause to reflect on hedonism and the relationship between pleasure and authenticity.


 The first thing that struck me as of particular philosophical interest was "Soma". Soma is the fictional drug taken by the new world's inhabitants and it functions as a very trenchant iteration of Nozick's experience machine. Unlike Nozick's original machine, soma requires very little in terms of metaphysical "jump": one could liken it to heroin without the side effects. Furthermore soma highlights the escapist tendencies of Brave New World's inhabitants. By taking soma the characters leave the reality which they ostensibly cannot deal with and submit themselves to a realm of pleasure inaccessible to more sober minds. This idea of "pleasure as escapism" may present some problems for a hedonistic outlook and raises questions about the dialectic between "fake pleasure" and "real pleasure".  Are there pleasures that fail to be valuable because they have no relation to objects outside of the subjects experience? Are mind altering substances providing fake happiness or real happiness?  Is a drunk happy to see you or do they merely think that they are in a welcoming mood?


Currently, I see little reason to make a hard distinction between the pleasures that are accrued through synthetic chemical manipulation, such as alcohol or soma based pleasures, and the organic chemical manipulations achieved through sugar, salt or a caressing touch. Furthermore if the thing that scares us about Soma is that it "merely creates pleasure" then what is that missing ingredient that allows us to be satisfied even if we are not enjoying ourselves? Pain? The outlook of John the Savage is rather reminiscent of Seneca: the roman philosopher who believed that suffering and tribulation should be cherished as a source of meaning in an otherwise empty life.

I can empathise with the Senecan position: life would become very boring if one was absolved of all tragedy. This I do not think is necessarily a problem for hedonists as the hedonic treadmill ensures that we will never run out of tribulations to give purpose to our growth. It may be that the reason we want struggle is that it gives context to our successes. We want struggle and heartbreak not because we don't value pleasure but because struggle and heartbreak make our pleasure worthwhile. 

My response to those who raise up Huxley's Brave New World as a warning against hedonism is that its citizens are not really committed hedonists. They are cattle who have been forcefully deprived of a range of pleasures, primarily intellectual ones, and conditioned to accept passivity as a state of enduring desirability.

When it comes to the relationship between pleasure and eudemonia what Brave New World articulates is a critique of lazy infantilization posing as the good life. As I have argued before, empty gluttonous carnality is not the same thing as an ethical and well-disciplined regime of hedonism.

The Trouble with the History of Philosophy

As with any sacred cow found to be defunct in the modern age, there are two extremist tendencies one can tend toward. You can either preserve its life forever as per sentimental faux-superstition or in a fit of capricious rebellion you can send it moo-ing and screeching towards the abattoir of obsolescence. Both are equally distasteful, especially when performed for show.

We will return to this point later.

 

The ancients of philosophy; Socrates, Plato, Aristotle et al have a peculiar relationship with their discipline. They are still considered, by some, relevant to the contemporary practise and study of philosophy.  Although, this is perhaps not as idiosyncratic as I have suggested. Plenty of young Artists and Musicians are required to study Titian and Mozart, despite the fact that almost no cultural pioneer in the 21st Century would dream of reproducing their style in order to "push culture forward". The greats are studied in these fields because they exemplify certain important principles or points in our cultural trajectory that are important for contextualising and understanding our practises today.


This stands in contrast with science which encompasses a range of disciplines few of which feel the need to force students to study ancient scientific literature uniformly rejected or superseded by contemporary scientists.

The key difference between science and philosophy then, which makes their treatment of their intellectual cannon so different, is in the scope of questioning. Science, as a method, in order to pay the meticulous attention to detail that it is known for keeps its set of questions narrow and measurable. This ensures precision, quantifiability and clear grounds of truthfulness and falsifiability for each and every statement made.

Philosophy keeps its remit wide. In fact its very draw to new students is that so long as the question is not empirical, philosophy considers that question to be valid and within the grounds of legitimate philosophical enquiry. This means that philosophy cannot guarantee the precision or prediction of concrete phenomena because it eschews such questioning in order to concern itself with the big picture. Philosophers are obsessed with how we fit concrete phenomenon's into systems of perception and rationalisation; we are not concerned with the shape of the game piece but rather with the form of the board it is being placed on and why.


Accordingly this bigger picture requires a wider grasp of history. While philosophers can and do work on problems that are being encountered and hashed out over the period of decades they also struggle with problems which encompass a huge portion of our mental schemas and accordingly are the product of debates raised raged over centuries. These large underlying mental schemas may be the product of a system of thought or categorisation of life that has been around for hundreds of years and so tracing the lineage of that system and understanding its root causes and relationships benefits from historical contextualisation.

This is why philosophy students sit down with Kant, who has been dead for over 200 years. It's why they recount the cantankerous blathering of Socrates and the musings of Descartes. Philosophy students need to understand that much of our intellectual strata is a product of our time. That does not mean it is relative or that it is wrong. It means that our current theoretical framework is merely one of the many ways in which humans have aimed to understand the world, it is not special... nor are the ways in which humans of the past understood the world.

In saying that...

Modern thinkers have some significant advantages over the philosophers of yore and especially over the ancients. First of all we have the advances of science and technology and this along with the invention of the social sciences has meant that today's theorists, which is really all philosophers are once you strip away their grandiose mystique, have more data to work on than ever before.


Ideas about society, gender or the constitutive parts of the world etc can be constructed with reference to actual data. Today, philosophers trying to make sense of how this world works have the benefit of our accumulated scientific knowledge when creating descriptive theories about concrete phenomena.


The second advantage that we have is that we have a huge head-start. Many of these questions have been discussed for a long time now and our philosophy has only gotten deeper, scientifically accurate and refined.

This is a fact that is often ignored and it often irks me when I see that so much of "pop-philosophy" is sold as an explication of ancient secrets. The problem with this marketing tactic is that it reinforces the public's perception of philosophy as something that hasn't progressed since Ancient Greece.

The truth is, depending on your audience, there is a mountain of modern research that is both thoroughly captivating and lucid enough for the layman to grasp. What's more an emphasis on contemporary philosophical research would work wonders in terms of public education. Both by introducing the public to modern philosophy as it is practised today but also by demonstrating philosophy's ever changing and fast paced nature.

To return to the theme of my opening paragraph, this is why I think the likes of Socrates and Kant provide a particularly difficult heritage to manage when it comes to PR.


On the one hand we need to avoid dwelling in the past. The likes of Alain de Botton do nothing but stultify the public's perception of philosophy while appealing only to those pompous and sycophantic fools who seem to think that every question asked in philosophy requires an obligatory homage to dead Greeks.


Alternatively our historical icons are worth acknowledging even if only for the pragmatics of delineating the roots of modern thought and contextualising contemporary debate. To cast the history of philosophy aside in the hope of acquiring some pretence to youthfulness by embracing an edgy irreverence towards anyone who doesn't or didn't own a smart phone would be simple un-cultured idiocy, even if it did work (and it probably wouldn't).

    

Goals for the Second Quarter

You know the drill, I hate these as much as anyone else does but it's my blog hence you will suffer through.

 

Here are three sub-resolutions, corresponding with my previously posted annual resolutions, that are intended to direct my energy into self-betterment threby challenging the status quo of self-destruction.  

#1 All Late Modern Fiction Makes Jack A Dull Boy.


While I do appreciate the ever expanding vistas that have been offered to me by loosening the rather tight leash that I normally keep my reading schedule on, as ever, I want more.  More contemporary work will be added to my diet along with some more European literature, preferably predating the 20th century.

#2 Fighting Machine

My cardio has gotten a lot better since the beginning of the new year and my diet is similarly in a much improved state. What I need now is an activity to  challenge me and provide some motivation so taking my cue from Dizzy Rascal and his immortal line "All I care about is sex and violence" I will join the local judo club.

I have not participated in any form of combat athletics for over two years now, I'm looking forward to making a return. As for the sex part, I'll just have to hope to get lucky more often.

#3 Dropping the Bass, in Favour of Something More Refined.

Basically this part of my resolution has been the one I have capitalised on the least. I figure this is because there is no clear method of progression. The method I now propose is looking over the Albums that I do own, online or physical, tracking down the artists recent work and looking through the sound-tracks of other media that I like for new bands and musicians. You have got to start with that which you already love.